The captain stood on the rope bridge strung above Cozamaloti’s edge and looked down the falls. Though the waters were indeed shot with rainbows as promised, they hardly roared with the voices of a thousand lions. A thousand kittens, perhaps.
A two-foot trickle gurgled over a lump of rock into a pleasant stream below.
Glomar frowned. He rather hoped there was some trick here, that this was an illusion disguising the true power of Cozamaloti from his eyes. After all, it took nary an ounce of courage for a man to make this leap! The most he had to fear was slipping on a wet stone and giving his rump a good soaking.
He looked up and down the River. How strangely calm it was! Glomar knew from previous excursions into the Wood that this part of the River should be rushing with rapids and building to a final climax. Instead, it had dwindled to little more than a sweetly bubbling streamlet. What, by all the Lights Above, could be distracting it so thoroughly upriver?
Ah well! No use in musing on unfathomable matters. Glomar turned back to the falls (more like the dribble) and studied it. Perhaps that hazy mist where the rainbow arched was actually a deceptive death plunge? Not likely. But if he really made himself believe as much, he might work up enough terror to make the jump a courageous one.
He climbed over the rope guard on the bridge and held on to it, hanging over the side. It swayed out and back again in gentle rhythm. Dragon’s teeth, it was like being a babe rocked in mother’s arms! This was no way to storm Etalpalli’s gates.
Shrugging, Glomar waited for the bridge to swing back out over the little drop. Then he let go.
Eanrin led the way through the Wood. Or at least he hoped he did.
Sometimes he thought he caught a gleam of gold, a flash of white, up ahead. But it vanished every time he looked twice. He trembled at the possibilities crowding his mind and forced himself to dismiss them. His life was what it was. Nothing was going to change.
Just because he hadn’t left this mortal girl to rot on the River’s edge did not mean he cared for her or her paltry story.
He picked his footsteps carefully, following a Path he believed he chose for himself. The mortal girl walked a few paces behind. He glanced back at her with a smile, admiring how quietly she proceeded, making surprisingly little noise for a human. Her bare feet were cut and sore, he noticed, yet she moved with grace, save when those awful cords dangling from her arms caught in the underbrush.
Something needed to be done about those.
Eanrin stopped and reached out to snatch the girl’s right arm. She jerked away, her eyes flashing curses as she backed up several paces. Eanrin laughed and shook his head. “You startle like a fawn, my girl! Come, don’t be so skittish. Don’t you think if I had intended to harm you, I would have done so long ere now? Use your brain and don’t be a fool. I want to examine those bindings of yours.”
The girl’s eyes searched his face. Truly she had been at his mercy for some time already, she told herself. Then again, he had made her kiss a bullfrog. Ugh!
But his face was not like that other.
Licking her lips and drawing a deep breath, the girl held out her hands. He lifted them to his face, sniffing. How like a cat he was in that moment, though his features remained those of a man.
He caught a certain scent and dropped her hands. For the first time since she’d met him, she saw fear in his golden face. It vanished so swiftly that she wondered if she’d imagined it; but she did not imagine the step back he took or the swift intake of breath.
Eanrin blinked once, then smoothed both eyebrows with the back of his hand. “Well, little one,” he said with a smile, “you have collected quite the variety of acquaintances, haven’t you? But I don’t want to know more. It’s not my business what friends you make, or enemies, for that matter. I’ll get these cords off you in any case.”
He drew a knife from his belt. Once more the girl gasped, but this time she forced herself not to flinch. He is a friend! she told herself. He won’t hurt you.
She looked away as he pressed the cold blade against her skin, slipping it under the painfully tight cords. He was gentle and did not cut her. In her mind, however, she saw another knife. A stone one, the blade jagged and stained.
The cords fell away, first from one wrist, then the other. As they dropped, the girl knelt, curling up in a ball. She thought she would be sick and struggled to force her stomach back down where it belonged.
“Oh, Lumé’s crown!” said the poet-cat, looking down at her. The next moment, an orange cat rubbed across the girl’s knees, purring noisily and flicking his tail in her ear. She sat up and, after a brief hesitation, ran a tentative hand along the cat’s head, back, and up the plumy tail. The fur was matted with mud in places, but his ears were softer than the soft skins she wore, and his body was warm and rumbling with life.